Sydney Meredith Silverstein, La Mamá de los Pollitos/The Mother Hen (2013)
Film Love and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center present:
Through the Image
Recent Documentary Work from the Visual
Scholarship Initiative
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Sydney Meredith Silverstein, La Mamá de los Pollitos/The Mother Hen (2013) |
Two provocative videos
demonstrating the power of the visual in storytelling and research
Friday, November 7, 2014
7:00 pm at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
$8 general | $5 student/senior | Free with
ACAC membership
That film is a visual medium is a surprisingly controversial notion,
for mainstream films are essentially verbal. They begin with written scripts,
their imagery supports spoken dialogue, and they are critiqued through language.
In most practice, then, films are made primarily of words, not images. Films
that prioritize the visual over the verbal – no matter what their content or
style – traditionally are assigned the label "experimental" or "avant-garde."
Documentaries have their own version of this dependence on words: narration
and the "talking head" interview. But other strategies, from 1970s observational
cinema to the current efforts of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, have
arisen in resistance to this, resulting in groundbreaking films like
Sweetgrass and Leviathan. The Visual Scholarship Initiative at
Emory University was formed early in this decade to investigate how to research
subjects and tell stories through images, sound, and other non-text-based forms.
On November 7, Film Love presents two engaging documentaries produced in Latin
America by members of this organization, that demonstrate the exciting
possibilities of telling stories and researching subjects through images. Both
videomakers will be present to discuss their work.
Sydney Meredith
Silverstein's video La Mamá de los Pollitos/The Mother Hen centers on a
Peruvian woman who raises chickens; the chickens and their eggs become a conduit
for viewing the many rituals of motherhood, courtship, flirtation, and sexuality
in the community. A. C. Klupchak's In the Lemon Grove documents a
hurricane-damaged town in Nicaragua, sustained by a nearby landfill and the
opportunities it presents for "collaborative commerce." In both works, dynamic
visual style and sensitive observation suggest that images tell us things words
cannot. Accompanying is David and Judith MacDougall's Under the Men's Tree,
a short classic in the tradition of observational documentary influential on the
Visual Scholarship Initiative.
Program:
Under the Men’s Tree (David MacDougall, 1968/73, 16
min)
La Mamá de los Pollitos (The Mother Hen) (Sydney
Meredith Silverstein, 2013, 26 min)
In the Lemon Grove (A.
C. Klupchak, 2013, 29 min)
The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
535 Means Street NW
Atlanta, GA, 30318
404.688.1970
http://www.thecontemporary.org/
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| A. C. Klupchak, In the Lemon Grove (2013) |
Through the Image is a Film Love event. The Film Love
series provides access to great but rarely seen films, especially important
works unavailable on consumer video. Programs are curated and introduced by Andy
Ditzler, and feature lively discussion. Through public screenings and events,
Film Love preserves the communal viewing experience, provides space for the
discussion of film as art, and explores alternative forms of moving image
projection and viewing. Film Love was voted Best Film Series in Atlanta by the
critics of Creative Loafing in 2006, and was featured in Atlanta Magazine's Best
of Atlanta 2009.